5 result(s) tagged “Death”

Some marriages come with two microwave ovens or two sets of dishes. Ours did, too, but it also came with two copies of Infinite Jest.

This speaks less to our reading habits than our book-buying habits. I do not believe that Bride of Culture Snob has read David Foster Wallace’s doorstop from 1996. I didn’t get far enough to invoke the 69-page rule, which dictates that I must finish a book once I’ve gotten to that point.

So I won’t tell you — now that he’s killed himself at age 46 — that I devoured every word he wrote, or that I’ve memorized favorite passages, or that I’ve ranked my favorite Wallace foot/end notes. I’ve probably read a few of his short stories and a dozen or so essays. My favorite was probably his report from the set of Lost Highway, which seemed a perfect match of author and subject. (Wallace’s writing and insight are far more interesting to me than the movie itself.)

I don’t feel the cultural loss, even though I know it’s significant. I claim no personal connection with Wallace. I simply feel vaguely sad, and a little ill.

I remember feeling this way when I heard about the death of Elliott Smith and the disappearance of Spalding Gray — something like the retrospectively inevitable fulfillment of dread, with no surprise and a sense of societal failure. Yeah, we shoulda seen that one coming.

They have no special powers. They have minimal identity or personality. Up until 2002, when 28 Days Later and (I’m told) Resident Evil made them fleet of foot, they lumbered around. In most conceptions, they merely hunger for human flesh.

A single zombie is an easy target. A single shot to the brain kills it — permanently, for good this time — in George A. Romero’s world.

It is only their easy, efficient reproduction that gives them any power — the exponential way that four become eight become 16 become 32 become 64 etc. if each only munches on or infects one other person.

It’s not hard to figure out why Robert Altman was the center of attention with last summer’s A Prairie Home Companion — even though we didn’t know at the time of its release that it would be his final movie.

Long before his honorary Oscar in March 2006, Altman was cool — a stubborn, renegade filmmaker whose biggest head-scratcher (Popeye) has somehow been transformed into an indicator of his unconventional greatness. His death in November merely gave Altman permanent ownership of A Prairie Home Companion, concerned as it is with passing, and the proper way to commemorate something that is gone.

But another reason that Altman was the focus — beyond film culture’s oftentimes-ridiculous bias toward directors — was that the alternative would be to talk about quaint, old-fashioned, uncool-even-by-public-radio-standards Garrison Keillor, who wrote the script.

To slake your thirst for Culture Snob poetry, as well as the interactive, I have crafted multiple options for haiku based on Lynne Stopkewich’s 1996 movie Kissed.

If you’ve never seen it or heard of it, I think you’ll get the gist pretty quickly. And if you’re a little rusty on the specifications of haiku, it’s a line of five syllables followed by a line of seven syllables and then another line of five.

Please offer finished poems — or more line alternatives — in the comments.

Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” isn’t about suicide, but it’s certainly a fitting backdrop for one.